Taylor Swift explained how the “hate frenzy” surrounding her during the Reputation era helped inspire the album’s sharper lyrics, including “Look What You Made Me Do.” The 36-year-old discussed the 2017 album during the Grammy Museum’s The Icon Sessions with Taylor Swift: A 20-Year Retrospective, which was posted to YouTube Aug. 24, saying the public scrutiny gave her songwriting a “gnarled bite.” Swift pointed to the long-running backlash that followed her 2016 feud with Kanye West and his then-wife Kim Kardashian over West’s song “Famous.” The track included a lyric claiming he made Swift famous—language the singer said she had not approved—while Kardashian later released edited clips of a phone call between West and Swift that appeared to show otherwise. A longer version of the call later surfaced, revealing West had not told Swift about the song’s most controversial lyric. Swift said she responded to feeling “cornered” by embracing a darker, tongue-in-cheek persona in “Look What You Made Me Do,” before ultimately finding “a tiny bit of warmth” in the album’s more vulnerable songs. Full Story: https://www.eonline.com/photos/37911/taylor-swift-songs-harry-styles-kim-kardashian-more-celebs-who-inspired-tracks
When people are in like a hate frenzy about a public figure or really anyone,
when people decide we're all going to stand around someone and point and mock them,
you can't respond with outward sincerity.
Look what you made her do. Taylor Swift revealing the real-life backlash that
inspired some of the most biting lyrics on her sixth studio album, Reputation.
Taylor reflecting on the Reputation era during the Grammy Museum's The Icon
Sessions with Taylor Swift, a 20-year retrospective posted to YouTube August 24th.
It was a time in my life when, for the very first time, not the last,
people had really actively tried to misunderstand me just in general,
and to misunderstand what I was trying to say, and to purposely misinterpret it.
And it felt very stifling as a person, as a human being, but ultimately as a writer,
it gave me this really, when I look back on it, this really sort of gnarled, like,
bite when I would write my lyrics.
Especially for Look What You Made Me Do, the album's lead single,
which Taylor said was born out of years of public scrutiny.
That included criticism of her famous girl squad, her romantic relationships,
and her high-profile feud with Kanye West and his then-wife, Kim Kardashian.
The dispute stemmed from Kanye's 2016 song Famous,
including a lyric Taylor said she never approved.
Kim later released edited clips of a phone call about the song,
before a longer recording of the conversation surfaced in 2020.
This is when I learned, like, when people are in, like, a hate frenzy
about a public figure, or really anyone, like, it could be, like,
you know, your daughter in her middle school class, like,
when people decide we're all gonna stand around someone and point and mock them,
you can't respond with outward sincerity.
Like, any attempts you make to explain yourself earnestly or sincerely
will just be mocked even worse.
And so I decided to put out a song called Look What You Made Me Do
as the first single where I, as a dead corpse, emerge from a grave
and then proceed to deliver this very, like, tongue-in-cheek,
sort of mischievous take on what it's like to feel cornered in that way.
And while Reputation went on to become 2017's best-selling album,
Taylor said the project was far more than clapbacks.
If you looked deeper into that album, it's an album about feeling so upset about
this mass shaming that you felt like you were going through.
You find this little cave and you crawl in there
and you try to find, like, a tiny bit of warmth,
and that warmth sustains you for the entire time
that you feel so massively misunderstood by people who don't know you.
So that was a really fun challenge of that album,
and I'm very proud of it when I look back on it.
And I think the things that I look back on now
is, like, when I've gone through something
that was, like, sort of an attempt to, like, drive me insane.
When you don't allow that to happen
and you use art and music as a way to, like, barrel roll out of that,
those are the moments I'm the most proud of.
